Nice try, Mr. Gingrich! Pandering to the Christian fascists at Liberty University with your ludicrously pie-eyed dreams of presidential glory, wrapping yourself up as a stern Defender of the Faith(tm).

What plays at Liberty University will win you no friends among the majority of Americans. You have even less of a chance than motley assortment of the other GOP also-rans who're running.

What you and your ilk don't get is that the harder you run on the GOP strengths, the further right you skew, the further away from the majority of Americans you take yourself, decreasing your electoral prospects.

No wonder your party has worked so hard to sabotage elections, to gerrymander districts, to challenge, harass, and intimidate voters, to suppress votes, to miscount ballots -- you realize in your hard little hearts that you can't win in free and fair elections. For a supposedly faithful movement, you folks sure don't have much faith in elections, or democracy, for that matter.

That an elderly ex-president working to help Katrina victims is forced to apologize, again, for speaking the truth about Bush galls me.

I'm glad you posted what you did, Ms. Walsh; I couldn't agree more! I cringed when I saw Carter immediately backpedal on his criticism. With Clinton neck-deep in the Bush dynasty's invidious good graces, only Carter had the political leverage for honest commentary, and he blew it with his apology.

What's worse is that now the media mandarins have this story arc (and the Israel flap) to hamstring Carter -- anything he says in the future will be framed by those things; the frames will overshadow anything else he says, if he even says anything like that again. "Oh, there's old man Carter, spouting off again. Carter has a history of reckless comments..." (cue sound bites)

Whether they want it or not, this administration needs endless, robust criticism -- that they so quickly went on the counterattack showed that Carter's comments hit them hard. Everybody of stature and standing should be taking shots at Bush, and certainly not taking it back.

Although I agreed with a lot of what Mr. Kamiya wrote, I took issue with this...

This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment.

We don't think so. We always get wary when Salon writers whip out the royal "we" when describing particular issues.

After the Republican-led circus impeachment of Clinton, I told people at the time that no president would ever be impeached again, regardless of what they did. They had, in their partisan zeal, disabled a vital weapon, ensuring that, with their lowball and tawdry crusade against Clinton, the bar would be set so high that presidents would be safe from impeachment henceforth, at least for the majority of Americans.

Although I also said that if Gore had been permitted to win in 2000, had he been president during 9/11 (assuming he'd mirrored Bushian behavior that let 9/11 happen at all; a debatable point), the Republican majority in Congress would surely have impeached him -- a far cry from their "stand behind the war president" stance when one of their own was in power. They'd have gone after Gore and Edwards and Denny Hastert would've been president, ickily enough.

And for the GOP apologists, yeah, who could imagine a party milking a national crisis for political gain? Not your GOP, right? Hahh! Their conduct speaks otherwise, so maybe Gore was lucky he was robbed in 2000; it spared him an impeachment.

That's just how partisan they are -- one side shrinks from the use of impeachment as a political weapon, and the other side doesn't (as the Clinton impeachmeent demonstrated). It says everything about how the parties operate.

Bush's Big Lie did insulate him from accountability for his actions -- maybe people (and definitely, Democrats) are afraid to really call him out on it.

What I find frightening is there's about 20% of the country who'd support Bush even if he made a literal bonfire out of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and declared martial law.

And maybe that's an important point -- the laws of a country aren't safe if they're trusted only to paper, and not in daily practice. Paper burns, after all. No, we need something more.

We're not a republic because the Constitution makes us one -- Americans made the Constitution to make us a republic; the Constitution didn't create Americans; we're one because we have democratic values. And those values are under attack by a leader, by a party, by an ideology, by some benighted parts of the country who apparently don't place a very high priority on those things. "Because I said so" isn't a democratic value.

Hopefully more in this country will realize that, and maybe then impeachment will be pried out of partisan hands and placed back into its proper place, as a weapon of national self-defense.

Sorry, Freudian slip, there. I wrote "Edwards" when I meant "Lieberman." Wishful thinking!

Nice column, Ms. Walsh. Very curious business, this whole thing! You wrote...

Goodling, remember, categorizes people as "loyal Bushies" and now "friendlies," a sophisticated taxonomy that's no doubt just another benefit of her rigorous education at Regent University.

What it looks like is war slang -- "Don't shoot'em, they're friendlies! There are some unfriendlies in the hills; get out the flamethrowers!" Says everything about the bunker mentality they have.

As for Mark McKinnon, he's a DINO gun-for-hire, by the look of things. This is the problem with DINOs in general; they think nothing of putting their particular talents to work for the GOP, even while being ostensibly Democratic, if the pay is right.

The thinking liberal has to ask: with friendlies like these, who needs enemies?